I Don't Belong Here

This is one of my absolute favorite RPG books I’ve read because it is pure art and creative inspiration. Every page is just story idea after story idea leaping off the page like lightning sparking your brain. The art and spark tables are perfectly evocative, creepy, and strange with nothing extraneous. These spreads grab you by the shoulders and beg you to use them in your game.

And the spells … oh my, the spells. This is what magic should be. Strange, chaotic, and oh so dangerous. So many of the spells have no clear utility, but they inspire me to imagine how I could find a way to use it to my advantage as a desperate character in a horror game grasping for any tool to give me an edge.

I am not particularly a Radiohead fan and have not played horror RPGs before, and that didn’t affect my enjoyment at all. This inspired me to look into the rules of liminal horror, and I can’t wait to run 3 sessions or so based on this.

Every RPG book should be more like this. I want less exhaustive rules text telling me what I can’t do and how to adjudicate climbing a tree. I want material that inspires me and my friends to play a session that surprises us at every turn and we never would have imagined.

Buy this book immediately.